Radi-gator (and radi-saurus)

vtfarmer

My wife caught me looking at old plumbing porn here so she suggested I post some of our handiwork. When we bought this old farm house it had beat up baseboard hot water heat downstairs (baseboards falling off of walls due to rust, front panels not fitting and exposing fins mashed into an ugly mess) and electric baseboards upstairs. Before we even closed on the property I had run heat loss calcs on most of the rooms and located cast iron hot water radiators off of craigslist that more or less matched each room's need. Within a week I'd completely ripped out the baseboard with glee (and found two places where it had been leaking so badly that it had rotten out the floor down to the sill).

I had the rads sandblasted and repainted them then my wife made some of them fun. The Radi-saurus is in our daughter's room and the Radi-gator is in the living room. The tie-die one is in the TV room and some day I'd like to see it with a Flir camera as I bet the heat gradient will loosely resemble the paint job. The little yellow one (downstairs bath) is my favorite. The others not pictured are either pastel colors that match the rooms (my wife's doing) or are modern European Myson panel rads in a few spaces where I couldn't make a CI unit fit.

There are at least three different brands represented but you can't tell unless you look closely.

hot_rod

Clever, I like the bold colors also.

Here is another favorite

Gilgo

Are you zoning room by room?
I don't see TRVs.

Rich_L

Now that's really making hydronics fun, those are great! I also love the fact that you took out the beat up old baseboard and didn't switch over to scorched air. Nice job!

flat_twin

Those are great! Where's Tyradisaurus Rex?

vtfarmer

@Gilgo no TRVs, but the zones are pretty small. The house is actually an old (1850) famhouse with an older (hand chiseled 12x12+ oak beams, so pre 1800?) structure roughly the same size connected at the end and finished inside to make a huge living room/kitchen and two oddly shaped bedrooms upstairs on that end. Each half of each building is its own zone: two downstairs and two upstairs. There's also a ~700 square foot in-law apartment on the back of the old dairy barn about 100 feet from the house which I made into its own zone as well. It's attached via insulated PEX running underground between the buildings, so technically this is actually a district heating setup - the wood boiler is also outside so I have buried a lot of ThermoPEX here!

@flat_twin I looked for a Tyradisaurus Rex for the large open living room space (it needs > 22k BTU on a design day - lots of windows) but I couldn't find one giant radiator on CL and ended up with two decent sized ones (one of which is the Radigator).

Thanks for the kind words!

Al Brown

My dad has been collection old thermostats for years

meticulousmike

nice creative job with them radiators,i've never seen anything like it before on here or out on a job somewhere but correct me if i'm wrong but aren't radiators supposed to have shiny silver paint on them?,i've read it somewhere here or there that they radiate that heat out better but i'm not sure if it made that much of a difference or not and also for what type steam or hot water.

psb75

Actually, you are wrong. Not shiny silver paint but flat black is the most heat-emissive paint for a cast iron radiator.